Society often overlooks those male sex workers. How did he get into that line of work? And how does this individual engage with front-line services? I sat down with Liam β a former sex worker β to gain deeper insight into these questions. Liam comes from a major town in Greater Manchester, is a fully qualified chef whose speciality was in wedding cakes and has worked all over the country.
At one point, he was married and has had children with two different women. He is also a grandfather. Crucially, it has taken many years for Liam to access front-line services. On the surface, there is nothing unusual about Liam, but what follows him is an incredibly dark past.
Much of what I was told is too extreme to include in the article and I have been debating internally as to whether to include certain information. For the sake of the well-being of the readers, I have decided to tone it down where most necessary. Between the ages of 8 and 12, Liam was abused physically, emotionally and sexually by his brother, who was ten years older than him.
At the age of 12, Liam was sent to a psychiatrist due to self-harming as a result of this abuse, which was perpetrated also by friends of his brothers. School was no sanctuary for him: he was beaten by the Brothers and Sisters at the Catholic School he went to as a boy for trying to tell them what had been happening to him. By 14, he began taking drugs and, understandably, puts this down to his difficult upbringing. He makes a point of saying that his father was decent, but believes that his mother knew.
Drugs became a new release β rather than self-harming, Liam started to take amphetamines. Later on in life, he would become addicted to harder drugs.
